Spirit of Truth, Spirit of Error

Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits, whether they are of God; because many false prophets have gone out into the world. By this you know the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God, and every spirit that does not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is not of God. And this is the spirit of the Antichrist, which you have heard was coming, and is now already in the world. You are of God, little children, and have overcome them, because He who is in you is greater than he who is in the world. They are of the world. Therefore they speak as of the world, and the world hears them. We are of God. He who knows God hears us; he who is not of God does not hear us. By this we know the spirit of truth and the spirit of error. (1 John 4:1–6)

There is a Spirit of truth and a spirit of error—and John gives us one decisive test to tell them apart.

An Age Drowning in Information and Counterfeits

We are living in an amazing time in history. The level of wealth and well-being we enjoy—not just in the West but throughout the world, especially in the last fifty years—is truly extraordinary. As a long-time student of history, I'm not sure I would choose to live at any other time. In light of modern science, technology, medicine, and markets, I can't imagine a better time to be alive.

But one of the drawbacks is that we are constantly bombarded by a massive amount of information that we cannot fully process. Consider the statistics: 300 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, 95 million pictures uploaded to Instagram every day, 63,000 Google searches per second, 500 million tweets daily. We've had to change how we interact with information, and that is a big reason platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook are so successful—they let us glance at a piece of data, instantly judge whether it's of value, and swipe past.

I'm not convinced our attention spans have been destroyed, because people will still binge-watch eight hours of a Netflix series. The real problem is that we cannot process all the data coming at us, and we're not sure what information we can trust. We now live in a world of "real news" and "fake news," and it is going to get harder to tell the difference.

Deep Fakes and Dangerous Counterfeits

Aided by machine learning and artificial intelligence, we now have what are called "deep fakes"—video, audio, or images altered to make you believe something is real when it is not. Soon it will be possible to produce footage of a world leader saying things that person never said, and it will be nearly indistinguishable from reality. As countermeasures improve, so does the technology, and we are quickly approaching a state where counterfeits become very difficult to discern—and very dangerous.

This is exactly what John is dealing with in this letter. Counterfeits are dangerous, and we need to become good at discriminating between what is real and what is fake. A counterfeit is only a counterfeit because it looks similar to the genuine. In John's day a counterfeit worldview—a counterfeit gospel, counterfeit truths we would now call heresy—was beginning to confront the church. John wrote this around A.D. 90 or 95, and these counterfeits only grew worse in the second century, prompting the church in the third century to address them through councils like Nicaea, identifying what is true and what is false.

A New Character: The Spirit

Throughout this section John has been contrasting true and false followers of God. Look back one verse to 1 John 3:24:

Now he who keeps His commandments abides in Him, and He in him. And by this we know that He abides in us, by the Spirit whom He has given us.

Here John introduces a new concept—really a new character—the Spirit who dwells in us. In most English translations the word is capitalized because we are speaking of the Holy Spirit. But bringing the Spirit into the discussion adds a new layer of complexity, because in John's day, just as in ours, people held differing views about spirit and spirits. So John must clarify what he means.

That is the purpose of 1 John 4:1. We have the Spirit who dwells in us (3:24), but "do not believe every spirit"—because there are counterfeits in the world. "Test the spirits, whether they are of God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world." John corresponds those false teachers to deceiving spirits at work in the world.

There Are Deceiving Spirits in the World

John's first point is clear: there are deceiving spirits in the world. He wanted first-century Christians to grasp this, and it is imperative that we, twenty centuries later, grasp it too. In revealing this, John tells us there is more to reality than what we can see, hear, touch, smell, or taste.

To understand this rightly, we must read it both in its original context and in ours. In John's day, people had no problem accepting that there is more to reality than what we can see; they believed in a spiritual dimension and recognized the supernatural or metaphysical as real. That is very different from many people in modern Western culture.

The growing view affecting Christians in John's day is what we now call Gnosticism. The basic Gnostic idea was that there is a material world we interact with through our senses and an immaterial, spiritual world—and that the material world is evil and defiled while the spiritual world is good and pure, and never the two shall meet. There are two immediate problems with this. First, it does not accord with Scripture, which reveals a spiritual world that is not uniformly good—there are unclean, deceiving things in the spiritual realm, exactly as John says. Second, it conflicts with the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation, in which God came into the physical world in the form of a human body.

The First-Century and Twenty-First-Century Counterfeits

Though people today don't see the world the way first-century people did—many secular-minded people deny any metaphysical reality—this passage is still helpful for us. John reveals there is more to reality than we can perceive with our senses, and twenty-first-century Westerners are skeptical of this. They see the world through a materialistic, naturalistic lens, shaped by a scientistic worldview over the last 500 years, and reject anything that cannot be tested empirically.

But notice: people who hold that view cannot fully live by it. They believe in love, yet you cannot verify love empirically. They believe in human dignity, yet you cannot measure the value of a human being scientifically. They make moral and ethical judgments all day long, yet empiricism cannot answer questions of truth, morality, beauty, love, or dignity. They believe in things outside the empirical purview.

Whether you hold a first-century Gnostic view or a twenty-first-century naturalistic one, according to John both may very well be counterfeits—and counterfeits are dangerous. The first-century counterfeit said everything physical is evil, therefore Jesus did not come in the flesh. The problem: if Jesus did not come in the flesh, His death on the cross is insufficient to deal with our sin. The twenty-first-century counterfeit says everything is physical, therefore Jesus is not God. The problem: if Jesus is not God, He does not have the power to save us. Both lead to a wrong understanding of who Jesus is, and that can be catastrophic.

Where Do Your Thoughts Come From?

Both counterfeit worldviews—the ancient and the modern—are spiritually derived; they originate from a spiritual source. This trips the circuits of modern Westerners, but it begs the question: where do your thoughts come from? We sometimes say, "the thought came to me," because we are not entirely sure. The immediate response is, "I just came up with it." Are you sure? Consciousness is a deeply sticky issue for empiricists; philosophers and now neurologists have tried for centuries to explain it, reducing it to a hundred billion neurons firing.

Yet you've had this experience: you wrestle all day with a problem you cannot solve, you go to sleep unable to figure it out, and you wake in the middle of the night and—boom—you have the answer. Where did that come from? According to Scripture, it came from a source outside of you. That may be frightening, but it is the Christian worldview. Ideas, and the ideologies and worldviews that flow from them, originate from a spiritual source, and we cannot trust every spiritual source, because deceiving spirits are in the world.

False Prophets and the Aim of Confusion

This is John's second point: I cannot trust every spirit. He says it this way—"many false prophets have gone out into the world." A false prophet is a professor of a false ideology, and we have many modern-day prophets professing false ideologies. Where did those ideologies come from? A spiritual source.

Though we don't have time to develop it fully, the primary objective of these false spirits, as revealed by Scripture, is confusion and disorientation—so that people separated from their Creator will not be brought into connection with Him or with one another. Consider the confusion and disorientation of our culture because of ideology. It seems these false spirits are doing a pretty good job. So John says: do not be deceived by counterfeit ideologies from false spirits. Test the spirits.

The Test: The Confession of the Incarnation

Here is John's third point, and the test itself:

By this you know the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God, and every spirit that does not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is not of God. And this is the spirit of the Antichrist.

The Spirit of truth confesses the Incarnation—that God, who exists outside the cosmos because He created it, came into the cosmos in the man Jesus Christ. It seems radically simple, but John gives us a stark contrast: there is either the Spirit of truth or the spirit of error, the Spirit of God or the spirit of Antichrist. No fuzzy, gray, murky middle. These stark contrasts make us uncomfortable, because they require discernment and discrimination, which are major problems for twenty-first-century Westerners.

A clarification is important here: if someone does not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh, it does not mean everything they profess is false. An unbeliever can reach right conclusions about science, technology, and medicine. But as it relates to fundamental reality—ultimate reality, values, morality, purpose, identity, origin, destiny—their conclusions must be suspect.

Wisdom Is Justified by Her Children

Jesus said, "Wisdom is justified by her children." It is a pragmatic statement: you will know the value of an idea by what it produces. Our culture is possessed by a pathological ideology, and we see its effects. For decades it has taught: our origin is random chance and mutation over billions of years; our destiny is to spread our DNA and then die and be absorbed into the ground; our identity is merely the highest form of animal—and perhaps not even that, since dolphins have bigger brains; our purpose is something we must invent for ourselves; and right and wrong are matters of opinion. What do you end up with? A hopeless nihilism—and that nihilism produces outcomes like Gilroy, California, last week, and El Paso, Texas, yesterday.

Friedrich Nietzsche understood this. Read his parable The Madman—it takes less than five minutes—where the madman runs into the street crying, "God is dead, and we have killed him… What shall become of us, the murderers of all murderers? How shall we clean up the blood?" Nietzsche predicted the twentieth century would be the bloodiest of all centuries, precisely because we have removed moral accountability and ultimate purpose. And that is exactly what we saw.

We should be suspect of ideologies that do not accord with the truth of who God is. This does not mean every Christian always does good—people have done evil in the name of Jesus throughout church history—but they always did so in conflict with the core teaching of Scripture. By contrast, when a naturalistic materialist does something vile, it is not in conflict with his worldview. When someone takes an AK-47 and shoots twenty people, that is not in conflict with nihilism—but it is in conflict with the worldview of Scripture. It all comes down to the nature of Christ, who is God.

"Jesus Christ Has Come in the Flesh"

John's test answers the first-century counterfeit, the twenty-first-century counterfeit, and every counterfeit in between. He gives it in both the positive and the negative to emphasize its importance, and it comes in three parts.

First, Jesus Christ. Jesus is His name, not Christ; Christ is His title. "Jesus" means "Jehovah is salvation"—God is the Savior. "Christ" means that this Jesus of Nazareth is that Savior, the one the prophets predicted. Second, has come. Some translations read "is come," because the Greek tense is difficult, implying both that He came at a specific point in the past and that He is the coming one. At the very least it means He came from somewhere else—from the spiritual realm. As Jesus said, "I have come down from heaven."

Third, in the flesh. The Gnostics had two views. One said Jesus was just a man upon whom a Christ-spirit descended at His baptism and departed before the cross—so He was not fully God and fully man. The other, docetism, said He only appeared to be human, an apparition. John destroys both: "Jesus Christ has come in the flesh." He is both Son of God and Son of Man. That means His death on the cross is a sufficient sacrifice to atone for our sin, and as God He has the power to save us. Everyone who does not hold this confession is of another spirit—the spirit of Antichrist.

Neither Surprised Nor Afraid

This is John's fourth point: we should not be surprised by, or afraid of, an antichrist spirit in the world. When Christians realize there is such a spirit, they often react one of two ways. Either they are surprised—but John says, don't be surprised; you have already heard it was coming, and it is here. Or they are afraid—but John says, don't be afraid:

You are of God, little children, and have overcome them, because He who is in you is greater than he who is in the world.

There are untrustworthy, antichrist spirits motivating false worldviews, ideologies, and philosophies through teachers and prophets professing false things. We should be neither surprised nor afraid.

The Spirit in Us Makes Us Overcomers

This is the fifth point: the Spirit in us makes us overcomers by His mighty power. Underline "have overcome." John does not say, "hopefully you will overcome them." He says, "you have overcome them"—the perfect tense, a completed event. What is the probability of little children overcoming this great antichrist spirit? On our own, absolutely none. But "greater is He who is in you than he who is in the world." We overcome not by our strength but by the working of the Spirit of God in us. The word means to prevail, to conquer, to vanquish—and it is a completed action, because as Romans 8:37 says, we are "more than conquerors through Him who loved us."

Lights in a Dark World

So what is the place of the Christian in a world in conflict with an opposing spirit? Our calling is to be lights in a dark world, bearing the truth of God to those who have believed a lie, so they would come to the knowledge of the truth and be set free. That is why God placed you in your neighborhood, your school, your office, your construction site, your family. We do not go out to fight the spirit through Dominion-theology schemes; we proclaim the gospel, because the gospel brings truth to those who have believed a lie. Once you were in darkness, and He gave you light, mercy, grace, and truth to set you free.

The value of this truth is seen in its outcomes: everywhere the gospel has gone, it has set people free. You wouldn't be here today if you hadn't been set free by it. In a few minutes we go out into our mission field—San Diego County, 3.2 million people, 110 languages, countless worldviews. Every one of those ideologies is spiritually motivated, and if it does not align with the reality of who Jesus is, it is of the spirit of error. That is a hard thing to say, because it may offend. But the gospel is an offense to those who are perishing, and there is no better thing than to set a stumbling block before someone running headlong toward a cliff, that they would know the truth and be set free. Amen.

Closing Prayer

Father God, we need Your Spirit. We need Your ability to be witnesses of You here in the place where we live. We are not sufficient of ourselves to think anything as being of ourselves, but our sufficiency is from You, and You are the one who enables us to be ministers and servants of the gospel. We pray that You would give Your church Your enabling power to be witnesses of Your grace to this world.

Lord, this world is possessed by ideologies that are pathological. They lead to confusion, disorientation, and death; they do not result in abundant life here or in eternity. I pray that we would be able to share the truth of the grace of the gospel so that others would know the abundant life we have through truth, grace, liberty, and mercy. Enable us to be witnesses of this in this world.

And as we are standing here this morning, it may be that you recognize you have been possessed by an ideology that does not align with this and has been leading you in the wrong direction. I want you to know that Jesus demonstrated His love for you on the cross, that you would come to know Him and experience forgiveness, grace, and abundant life through the gospel. You can have that forgiveness and grace today by receiving Christ as your Lord and Savior, simply by confessing Him and asking Him to come into your life.

If that's you, pray with me: Dear Jesus, I recognize my need for You. I pray that You would come into my life, that You would forgive me of my sin, and that You would help me to follow You by faith. In Jesus' name.